Walking the Dust
23: World's End
As I headed West, I soon realised why the Sunspot folks who were too sick or old to make the journey East hadn't come this way instead.
So far the going had been tough and mountainous. But there was water, some animal life, grass, and plants. Like I said, it's hard, but you can survive. West of the town, though, it just got worse. The rivers disappeared. Or maybe the canyons I saw were all dried-up beds. Plant life was scarce. Grass was non-existent. There were no rats, and even scorpions seemed thinner on the ground.
Worst of all, there was little shelter because the terrain was flattening out, and I could hardlly see the horizon for sun glare and a misty haze over the land.
In less than a week, all my water had gone. I was starving. I didn't want to know what I looked like after days of blistering sun and nights of freezing cold.
Then I heard voices on the wind for the first time since Sunspot. Father told me and Jerod tales of men lost in the desert, and how the heat would play tricks on their minds, making them see and hear things that weren't real. I couldn't see where these voices were coming from, and thought I was succumbing. Time to turn back, and hope I could make it to civilisation alive.
But before I turned around, these voices got louder. There was a canyon. The lip was hidden behind a small rise, and I literally stumbled upon it, but there it was. And at the bottom were people.
I made my way down the canyon side carefully, but still almost fell when I met the first goat, chewing on some stringy roots sticking out of the wall. The people below waited patiently, thirty men, women and children in a shady spot underneath an overhang. There were no houses or huts. Nomads, I assumed. Insane nomads, at that.
But I was wrong. This was their home, and they called it World's End because it was the last living place before the deadlands. They lived in crevices and caves in the canyon walls, sheltering from the sun and the cold. They planted ground vegetables, like Brode in Dry Flats, and kept goats — the ones I met on the path down.
That still didn't explain how they could live here. But then the wiseman, an old guy called Cryd, showed me a well they'd dug out of the soft floor of one cave. It was deep, but you could hear the water flowing down there under the ground. It was their only supply, but it was enough.
I asked how they could be so sure they were the last people in the West. They said that nobody who ever went West of here had returned. And nobody had ever come out of the West, either.
Given what I endured to get here, I believed it. But I must have still looked skeptical, because Cryd asked me to walk with him, and we mounted the path up the other side of the canyon.
We stood at the top and looked West. The land faded into a blanket of haze and desert glare, making it hard to tell where land ended and sky began. Cryd said the weather today was bad; on a good, clear day you could see all the way from here to the Endless Water, and there were no other people inbetween.
This was the World's End.
But back down in the village, nobody had ever seen a “good, clear day”. They just didn't happen. Cryd said it was because he was older than everyone else, and only he remembered. Me, I wasn't sure what to believe.
I stuck around for a while. There was something about World's End that I liked.
But Cryd got sick the day after I arrived. Started coughing black bile, and his skin broke out in scabs. He raved about the Endless Water, asking to be taken there, telling everyone it was just a short walk into the West. They humoured him, but nobody took him seriously.
And neither did I. Even if there was something out there, there was no way I could survive. I'd reached the end of my journey, and already made up my mind that I would turn back. Call me a coward, but I knew that nothing I'd seen and learned would be any use if I died before I could get it all down, just like I am now.
The Endless Water would remain forever a mystery to me, and to everyone else... except maybe Cryd.
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